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Chapters (65)
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  65. Acknowledgements

‘Food-truck girl up Gavrik way?’ she says.

‘Yep.’

Margareta nods and lights up a cigarette. No strategic smoking with her head up the chimney now, she just lights up with her back to a non-smoking sign, her ’70s weave underneath an illuminated fire-escape sign.

‘I can make flyers and maybe coordinate some social-media campaigns if you like?’ I say. ‘If you can let me have a recent photograph of Emil, I can put a piece in the paper as well.’

‘Front page, is it,’ she says?

That strikes me as an odd question, but I guess she’s in shock. ‘Most likely,’ I say.

She nods and swipes through photos on her phone.

‘How about this one?’ she smiles and shows me the screen. It’s a photo of her and Emil standing on the roof, backdropped by the giant, turning bee. Margareta takes up most of the photo.

‘It’s a beautiful picture,’ I say. ‘But do you have one just of Emil?’

She exhales smoke through her nose and swipes again, shows me one of him, and then I help her email it to me.

‘I’m sure we’ll find him,’ I say.

As I open the door to return to the square I hear the theme tune of Cheers start up in the other room. The TV volume must be extremely loud. Is there someone else in the owner’s apartment? Or does Margareta have it playing constantly on a loop?

I step out onto the pavement. The sickly smell has intensified, like the jet-wash water is churning the mud into some kind of poison cider.

The Sheriff’s car turns up and parks. He gets out.

‘Poor kid,’ he says as he looks over at the Hive.

I shake my head. ‘Dragged off the street like that.’

‘I’ve known little Emil Eriksson since he was knee-high to a cockroach.’

‘Grasshopper,’ I say.

‘Not Emil,’ says Sheriff Hansson. He never got that big.’

There’s a screech from above and a white owl lands on the roof of Sheriff Hansson’s taxi. The owl has a rat in its talons. Some kind of sewer rodent, still twitching with the last electronic pulses of its life. The owl looks at us calmly and then she digs her curved beak into the neck of the rat and she feasts.

44

The Sheriff tries to scare the huge bird away, but the owl tells him to go to hell. She takes her time with her hard-won rat. She pulls at it with her beak and she eats. And then, when she’s done, she flies away, leaving a bloody mess on the taxi roof.

‘Pest,’ he says with his fist in the air. ‘Goddam buzzard.’

It was an owl. Even I know that was an owl.